The Timeless Way of Building

gga

For the past year or so, this was my bus book. That’s a
surprisingly long time, and it probably shouldn’t have taken me that
long to read. Late last year, about 50 pages from the end, I paused in
my reading; and then took several months to pick it up again. This
seems unfair to the book: it deserved a much more coherent read than
that. Though, the ideas are different enough to also benefit from a
considered read. I’ll pick this up again sometime, and I promise to
read much faster that time. Anyway.

One sentence summary: this book will forever change the way you
look at and think about buildings, towns and architecture.

Alexander firmly believes that modern planning and building
practices are bankrupt and can only result in inhospitable,
unwelcoming cities and homes. A belief that seems to be firmly born
out by most urban planning since the Second World War: just look at
the damage Harry Seidler has wrought on Sydney for an example close to
home. This book is a polemic, a grand rant against the current state
of his own industry and art. A work in the tradition of many a genius’
(and quite a few
looney’s) Let’s
Blow Up the Universe screed. So, genius or looney? I’ve probably
already given away my opinion on that matter…

Ultimately, it would not do this book any justice to attempt to
briefly summarise what it has to say.

But what the hell, I’ll give it a shot anyway. Alexander’s central
thesis is that there is a shared quality amongst those towns and
buildings where people feel most at home; a quality independent of
culture, climate and history. He also believes that this quality can
be easily achieved, by any person who chooses to build. It is a matter
of recognising the forces within the people who will use the building
or site and then balancing those forces with the forces intrinsic to
the specific location and society. He even outlines a prescription for
achieving this balance: a collection of patterns to duplicate in
design, planning and construction, with instructions on how to combine
these. A language of patterns to construct our built environment.

Unlike many other polemics, this is highly detailed and
descriptive: it describes the quality to achieve and then gives
instructions on how to achieve it.

If you live in a large city in Australia, it’ll be pretty obvious
while reading this book that this is not how building is done. First,
Australian building practices place the car as king of all. Any
building or neighbourhood must be designed for the maximum convenience
of the car: people are a distant second. Second, Australian building
practices harken back to some long forgotten European past: everyone
wants a little brick English cottage, though nothing could be more
generally inappropriate for our climate. The
Queenslander
is not the standard archetype for Australian residential building
unfortunately.

The current popular obsession with being ‘green’ is driving people
to a certain superficial realisation about the car. But that is only a
symptom of a far deeper problem. Loudly proclaiming that cars are evil
and must be disposed of is never really going to achieve anything. And
that sort of unbalanced (in the forces sense) thinking will inevitably
lead to other problems. As much as I’m a fan of the specific remedies
proposed in Jan Gehl’s research paper into Sydney’s CBD, I do feel
some uneasiness.

The pattern approach that Alexander talks about is intended to
completely avoid unbalanced forces. He regularly uses cars in his
discussion of patterns. They are real, they are valuable and they’re
not going to just disappear. A central point of these patterns is that
they’re not something Alexander has devised as a new architectural
‘-ism’ to imprint his vision on the world. These patterns are things
that arise naturally, given the way all humans want to live. Growing
organically out of a combination of the people and their
surrounds. There is a sequel to The Timeless Way of Building, A
Pattern Language, that acts as a catalogue of the most important
patterns that Alexander and his colleagues have observed in
successful towns and buildings.

In the US there is a growing style of design
called ‘New
Urbanism’ that attempts to encourage the buildings and towns that
Alexander commends so highly. It is interesting to note that in Europe
that name is largely unused, people preferring to use ‘The Way Towns
are Designed’ instead. It is also interesting to note that in
Australia, we have neither.

Finally, why did I, a software engineer, read this book? To the
surprise of many architects, Christopher Alexander is very well known
in the field of computer science. In the 1960’s his work was
discovered and his concept of patterns was co-opted. No serious
software engineer can possibly not be familiar with the world of
design patterns: named rules for particular structures of code to
solve certain problems. It’s my opinion that while initially off to a
good start the modern Design Patterns movement has completely missed
the point of Alexander’s original teaching.

His intent was not to catalogue an exhaustive set of patterns that
may be thrown at a problem until a solution emerges. His intent was to
define an interlocking language from which you can select appropriate
terms to grow a solution. In his case a building or town, in my case a
software system. Modern design patterns seems to ignore the essential
organic growth aspect of a pattern language, and instead seems to
focus on cataloguing. An unbalanced approach.